Today Joe and Hannah would be refused at the border as unwanted aliens

Charles Hall with Joe and Hannah

"In 1853 a British whaling captain had persuaded an Eskimo couple, Tookolito and Ebierbing,to accompany him back to London. Over two years they had learned English, had adopted the mannerisms, dress and religion of their host nation and had become minor celebrities. They had been presented to Queen Victoria and had won the hearts of a society that revelled, as no other, in converting others to its own ways. When the novelty wore off they were sent to New York, where they created no less of a sensation. Then they were dropped back on Baffin Island complete with new names ('Joe' and 'Hannah') and a new wardrobe, to be forgotten save by passing whalers who sold them articles of western civilization to which they had become accustomed. " - 'Ninety Degrees North', Fergus Fleming, image from Northern Exposures]

High civilizations are bound for the North Pole

"Man, as an animal, is indeed, a tropical animal. But man, as distinguished from animals, is not at his best in the tropics or very near them. His fight upward in civilization has coincided in part at least with his march northward over the earth into a cooler, clearer, more bracing air." - Vilhjalmur Stefansson (The northward course of empire, 1922).

The book is an elaborate crack-pot argument celebrating the unappreciated richness of the Arctic rather than a geopolitical survey of empires, their temperatures and the inevitable polar thrust of society you would perhaps expect. It opens with the above graph and it's hard to not to smile. 

Tuniit art in the medieval warm period

Robert McGhee's 'The last imaginary place' surveys the human history of the Arctic north, showing that people without history (to use the phrase by Eric Wolf, another brilliant book I am reading at the moment ) do have a complex, living past. The history of the now extinct Tuniit or Dorset culture is worth your attention, I was particularly intrigued by the following quote that links the number of artistic artefacts with the despair brought about by climatic change:

 The art of the Dorset people is so varied and intricate that it allows a glimpse of the spirit-world known to these ancient hunters, a world resembling in many ways that of the other northern shamanic peoples, yet unique to this society that developed in the relative isolation of Arctic North America over a period of almost five millennia. Their art also appears to foreshadow the end of Tuniit society. In the last few centuries of their existence, between about AD 1000 and 1500, Dorset artists produced an ever-increasing number of amulets and objects of shamanic use. This was also the period of increasing stress on the societies to which the artists belonged. In these centuries the Northern hemisphere was subject to warming climatic conditions that are known in Europe as the Medieval Warm Period. To Tuniit hunters who seem to have been adapted to primarily to hunting on land and sea-ice, the unexpected appearance of open water during early summer or a delay in the expected freezing of autumn seas would have brought hardship and often disaster.

At the same time the Viking were using the warmer conditions to find their way to Greenland and beyond.  Image:"Miniature ivory mask representing a humanface, Dorset, Devon Island, Nunavut, circa 1700 B.C." Possibly it's a portrait, they lines may represent tattooing? A humbling face.

The Sentient City [locative media again & again & again...]

On request of Dutch architecture website Archined I wrote a little review of the book launch of Mark Shepard's recent 'Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space' (MIT Press) at the V2. I was intending to travel to Rotterdam but as there was a live-stream I stayed at home to watch it on screen. The subject used to be close to my heart but right now I would never attend anything having remotely to do with such things: I have had enough of them. After the rise and fall of the imaginary locative media lab (2003-05) and my own equally fascinating and exciting but equally doomed Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture (2007) and a few other events and projects in between the entire internet-of-things/augmented reality/locative media range of ideas and projects smell like short-sighted techno-fetish careerism and arty fartsy surveillance chic in ludic preparation for the aggregating police state. The people I met in association with the above projects were almost always terribly gifted and the tech implementations can be great in a grass-roots professional way but to my mind it all remains so bloody dull conceptually: putting a chip here and a GPS device there, tagging this, mapping that... I want to experience the city as an Eskimo experiences the Arctic not as a programmer experiences buggy code. But the set of issues addressed are important and pertinent to almost everybody's lives and so I welcomed the opportunity to step outside my own micro-niche bubble for a few hours and revisit these ideas.

Calling a city sentient is an easy thing to do but impervious to a precious definition. The term 'sentient city' overstates its case I think and when Shepard writes that "the city is sentient in the sense that it has a communicative potential" you know this to be true. Sentience is about the awareness of pain (and joy) not about communication. The KIller of Kirkwall showed compassion in the sense that he didn't beat his poorly old mother every day. Putting pedantry (my special gift) aside, I did enjoy the evening's focus on the correlation between locative media and the public sphere. This came out best in the talk by Martijn de Waal who used the classic social democratic rhetoric on public space as a stabilizing and creative force in the open society to offer his take on 'sentient technology'. His approach to locative media was to regard them as a new medium for investigative journalism, as partisan research that, when down properly, goes beyond mapping and reporting and becomes public property as it fires discussion and engages people into actors rather than consumers. It is not an earth shattering observation but it was well rehearsed and somehow it warmed me to the possibilities. 

Watching a conference stream turned out to be a great exercise in voyeurism. The audience shots I thought especially fascinating with people rolling their eyes and pulling long faces.  Between the face shots you find some of the notes I typed down during De Waal's talk. I do apologize to the three speakers (De Waal, Mark Shepard and Michiel de Lange): it must be terrible to watch yourself in such pics, they do nobody justice. 

How is the sentient city changing the way we deal with the city?

Sentient technology: as a match between city (public space) and virtual space ( the other public space)

The youtube documentation is more important than the real event : international pillow fight day but also Syria and Egypt

Trash Track as an example of what the public space of the city of the future might look like

Urban public sphere: Jane Jacobs: great cities are not like towns but larger. 

The basic condition of the city is that we don’t know most people.

At times we need to relate to them and deal with them.

This is what urban space is doing.

Because of urban spaces we can live together.

Public sphere = public performance.

So far these places have been physical: bringing people in physical contact.

Quoting Habermas: the public sphere is a product of the industrial revolution with the newspaper as the central mode of communication.

Public sphere was invented in London coffee houses.

How can sensing and aggregating technologies be used to organized publics.

Bringing back issues to the public (waste, pollution, etc)

How do you from mapping to engaging public (interface)?

How to create something you can interact with.

Question: I think the public sphere is created through social action: are you not manipulating the sphere rather than making it?

Answer: architecture has always done this: like Jane Jacobsen arguing for small blocks in grids to enlarge the possibility of random encounters.

Is an architect creating volumes of space or a creating social interactions?

Q: Are you not overstating the function of the architect?

The evening then moved into a longish debate about the role of the architect the profession's equivalent to the question how many angels fit on the point of a needle and I opened a beer.

http://www.sentientcity.net

http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/

http://www.martijndewaal.nl/
http://www.bijt.org/wordpress/

http://www.themobilecity.nl/

The afforestation of the Arctic

Global warming is melting the ice and creating space for weeds. All this is disheartening but I will be interested to learn how the primary people of the North will learn to exploit these new biological niches. The images show the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index of the globe and the arctic.